I'll Do Anything for Warmth — Part 2
The world is bright!
I only pushed myself in a little farther, and the dim interior flooded with light. What I couldn't see a moment ago is perfectly clear now.
The lower level is packed with heretics. Above, figures with iron lids clapped over their bodies have something aimed straight at me. Only the eyeholes show, and yet I can see their faces entire. Strange. Most of their light is weak, though — nothing but the tiniest warmth, light that will fall to me before long.
Burst even one, and the rest would come tumbling down in a heap. But gathering embers never makes you warm. A little warmth brushes my fingertips and scatters, and all it does is remind me, once again, just how much colder I am.
More warmth. Hehe.
And how convenient — the place is full of living things I'm free to do anything with. So I'll do anything. This creaking body moves a good deal more easily now, so first I take another look around.
In front of me stands a big man, his face tattooed with marks that look religious. At least in this place, he ranks the highest. Plenty of the people waiting above are worried about him, and the lines of their weapons' fire do not pass through him.
Huh? How do I know they're worried?
I can read a human face well enough, but this place is crowded with things that look like people and things that don't — every sort of creature. And yet, strangely, I can tell what emotions they hold, as if I could reach out and take them in my hand. I don't know what they're thinking. The taste of feeling, though — that, at least—
Taste?
Ah! All the countless lights I've licked until now. Lick one, and the memories come pouring in, and I've eaten so many that I can understand the creatures here. I know, at the very least, that the big man in front of me is furious. But that can wait. Down below, fragments of light lie scattered.
No — my warmth!
Clank.
Something is holding me. I don't need to look. Iron shackles circle my arms and legs, chained to the chair. I forgot.
"Be calm, I beg you. I am not your enemy. We pray the god will hear our entreaty — grant us our wish."
All sorts of things I want to say come crowding in. Call me a god, bind me like this, and then tell me to listen — how many would actually listen?
Look up, and far off several figures have me in their sights. Not guns. A kind of bow, though so enormous they resemble the ballistae I've seen in games. Some power I don't recognize ripples along the tips of the bolts, and I know that if one of them hits, this vessel will certainly shatter.
That won't do. There's warmth right in front of me — but I have no wish to be flung back down to that bottom without even getting it.
I turn the head. Not my head. A girl's. As the brain cells tumble and roll, memories surface, the way they do when I lick the light.
She was a child of a reasonably well-off house, raised with love. She had some special power besides, and with it a bright future had been promised her. Then the heretics came armed. They killed her parents, killed her family, killed the servants. When everyone was dead, they drove something strange into her tongue atop the heap of corpses, checked for something, and knocked her unconscious.
She came to surrounded by people chanting a strange spell. She tried to scream. Her body would not obey. And then — a flash. In the same instant her heart was carved out with some strange instrument, she died watching an oddly shaped blade punch down into it through the pain.
I can't see where the heart went. The S-shaped knife that pierced it hangs at the man's waist. I glance around, quietly, and there isn't a scrap of meat to be seen. Then that's fine.
I don't know why, but the hole that gaped in the center of the chest is gone as well. The sense remains that my power did something — only, there is no heart. While I was at it, I swapped in something a little more efficient. Driving the blood by rotation instead of a pulse is quieter, if anything. Feeling anew just how noisy a body is, I set my eyes on the man.
There are several things I ought to ask. First, though, I should take the measure of whether what he wants is even possible. And if it isn't? I'll only be ejected back outside. What else is there?
"What's the wish?"
The moment I finish, the people below — draped in coarse straw matting — break into a murmur. Huh. Did I say something wrong? I asked in the language the girl knows, so the meaning ought to have carried. She doesn't seem to be a foreigner.
"Revenge."
The man answered short. He said it loudly enough, though, that the murmuring died at a stroke. Is this what they call charisma? Well, you'd need a gift like that to rule a heresy of this sort. His gift for answering a question, on the other hand, is a flat zero. Say nothing but revenge, and how am I supposed to know what you mean?
"I'll need a more detailed explanation."
At that, the man fell silent. Huh. Did I ask wrong? I think I have the event itself right — they offered up a Sacrifice and called a god into this flesh — but perhaps I didn't speak the way they wanted. Does this place have a habitus of its own, too? A culture only a certain society is permitted to enjoy?
"First, give us the name that speaks your essence."
An emotion thick enough to kill a person, and have some left over, is pouring off him. He's wondering whether I am truly the one who bears a name like a curse. It crosses my mind, far too late, that perhaps I ought to have been role-playing from the start. Too late now. I'll go as I am.
A name that speaks my essence. Did I ever have such a thing? When I was human, I had a name. I don't now. I never needed one.
Crack.
Oh!
The shackles crumbled and fell away. Does that mean they accept me? Or did the iron simply wear thin and burst? I don't care. What matters is the warmth, slowly slipping away.
I pass the man and go down to the lower level, toward the place where the corpses lie strewn.
Squelch.
Blood and lumps of meat cling to the soles of my feet. A faint warmth still lingers there. I set my foot on it.
Squelch.
Oh! Warmth so much warmer than the light staring blankly up at me from down here — and so varied. Some of them lived well. Some lived unhappily, and died that way. There's even someone who threw their own life away. What a waste. You're so thin, like a drop of water fallen into ice. But warmth is warmth.
Squelch. Squelch.
It isn't the corpses that hold the warmth. Something like a soul, perhaps. That's what is warm. I tend to think that when you die you go off somewhere at once, so this may not be the soul itself, but the wreckage it left behind.
Huh. Then did I die once?
To die, and be born again. I've seen it often enough in books. But am I really something like that? Or am I still swimming through a nightmare? Has something gone wrong with my body — is all of this only a faint hallucination I'm watching while I die?
It's all right. The warmth heats my heart. Memory is only the seasoning.
Squelch.
I go to the last heap of corpses and set my foot upon the warmth, then lick the light that climbed up through my foot. This person was tremendously rich. Viciously so — someone who took pleasure in killing people without distinction, who caught them and cut them open.
Even someone like this is warm. As I thought, this warmth has nothing to do with good or evil.
I take the stairs again and climb. They let me clutch so much warmth; some return is due, in its own way. I don't care for the hard stone chair, but up I get. Standing on it, I look straight at the leader of the people who called me.
"There. I've answered your question, and I've taken in plenty of warmth. Before this heat cools, give me the detailed explanation I didn't get before."
Oh.
For an instant, disgust shows on the man's face — the look of someone staring at a thing that does not belong. That suits me. The memory of a human man whose light has already faded puts it plainly.
Frolicking on top of the corpses — is this crazy bastard out of her mind?
Yes. But sometimes there is something more important than being a person at all. An ordinary, moral human man fell into that place where there was nothing, soaked to the marrow in a cold that bored into the bone, and came to crave warmth. That is me. So if we are being strict about it, yes — I am mad. And since no one can know it without having lived it, he will judge me mad long before he ever understands me.
Thinking that, I watch him, and before long he begins to set out his wish in detail.
"The slaughter of the kings and lords, the generals and ministers of every land, and of the high leadership of the temples. And, upon every object of revenge our faithful cannot help but crave, a death there is no escaping."
Hm.
I know. There is no true heart in the first of it. Call it propaganda: this is what our order wishes, so if you agree, come and stand with us. That is all he said. The sincerity is in what came after.
I can tell just by looking at this temple of stone. It is packed full of resentment, because a diary longing for someone's death is written all through it. Well — the only people who would lose their minds to a sickening heresy like this are people of that sort. Even so, there seem to be rather a lot of them. Some will have clung on for the profit. Some will have changed their minds. And failing that, some will have sold their hearts somewhere else entirely.
There's a problem.
"How?"
I don't know how. All I know is that if I scoop myself up into a light I have touched, an explosion follows in the physical world.
That was when it happened.
From the shadows of the ceiling, the man who had been leveling his weapon fires the ballista trained on me. He is full of rage, but there is no despair in him. Quite a bright light.
Strange. As a rule, these are lights in a far place I cannot reach — lights that fall only after the explosion, once they have lost a great share of their original heat. This one reaches my hand.
The ballista punches through my head and tears away more than half my face. The fact that the warmth touched me matters more.
Still—!
Warm—!
Warmth!
I seized the warmth in my hand.